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VIVA CUBA! THE CUBAN NATIONAL SERIES IS CREATED

In the early weeks of 1899 (NOTE: around the same time as in real life), the third baseball competition outside of the United States was announced: the Serie Nacional de Beisbol Profesional de Cuba, to be known in English as the Cuban National Series (CNS).

The competition would feature teams from seven cities in Cuba: two from Havana and one each from Camaguey, Holguin, Matanzas, Pinar del Rio, Santa Clara, and Santiago de Cuba. Venues would range in size from 4,000 or so (Estadio Santa Catalina) in Santa Clara to 17,500 (Gran Estadio de la Habana) in the capitol city, although most of the parks in the CNS would sit under 10,000 people. Also, each team would play the others sixteen times to make a 112-game schedule.

The CNS would differ from the other leagues in two major ways. First, due to relative lack of travel CNS executives decided that normal series lengths would be two games instead of the more standard three or the historical five (NOTE: In reality, this is because the schedule-making engine refuses to add on series of two games in length after four sets of three if you want teams to play each other sixteen times). Second, because the summer is one long rainy season for a large portion of the Cuban island it was decided that it would be better to have the competition run over the late autumn and early winter. Because of this, the inaugural season of the CNS would start on the first Saturday of November in 1899, and not the first Saturday in April or May.

The eight founding members of the Cuban National Series: the Camaguey Bulls, Havana Sugar Kings, Holguin Miners, La Habana Miners, Matanzas Scorpions, Pinar del Rio Tobacco Growers, Santa Clara Saints, and Santiago Stars.











Pay for players in the league wasn’t much – Cuba was becoming independent from Spain, so the people were only just starting to keep the country’s economic output at home (NOTE: technically the Cuban Republic didn’t exist until 1902, but let’s suspend reality since this is a fake baseball universe). Players weren’t going to move around much, and likely the only way they were going to move abroad – to Canada or the U.S.A. – was if the front office granted permission and sold the player to their new team.

While the announcement of a Cuban league came in the early days of the last year of the Nineteenth Century, starting the league in November meant that the Cuban National Series would be the last competition of the Nineteenth Century and the first to determine a champion in the Twentieth Century.